


How And Why Steven Moffat Drove Doctor Who Into A Ditch

by PlaidAdder



Series: Doctor Who Meta [5]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Day of the Moon, Episode: s03e10 Blink, Episode: s06e08 Let's Kill Hitler, Gen, Impossible Astronaut, Meta, Nonfiction, Steven Moffat Era, Wedding of River Song, river song story arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nonfiction. I attempt to explain why the man who wrote some of the most memorable episodes of seasons 1-4 of Doctor Who has done, on balance, a crappy job of running the show in series 5-7.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How And Why Steven Moffat Drove Doctor Who Into A Ditch

Long ago I used to have a Crackpot Theories page at the Adder's Lair, and one of these crackpot theories was about why there was no good film adaptation of  _Hamlet._  (This was formulated just after viewing the Kenneth Branagh one. Since then, there have been a couple other  _Hamlets_  that did a better job.) But anyway, the theory goes like this: When a director has reached the stage of famousness that makes it possible for him to direct a film of  _the_  most canonical text in the English language, and he decides to do it, that means that a) he has an ego the size of Texas already and b) nobody on the team will be in a strong enough position to say 'no' to him. And this is a recipe for disaster, no matter how talented the director himself may be. Because it's like this, with creative work: No matter how gifted you are, not all your ideas will be good. Because they're your ideas and you love them, you don't always know how to tell the good ones from the bad ones. So you need someone who can tell you when your ideas are bad. Now if you understand that, then even when you become the Big Cheese you will make it a point to listen to feedback from those below. But if, like many a creative type, you believe that all your ideas are inspirations sent directly from the gods, then once you get to the point where you don't  _have_  to listen to anyone else's opinion, then you don't.  
  
This is the best explanation I can come up with for the apparently baffling phenomenon of seeing a guy who was, I thought, very very good at writing individual episodes of  _Doctor Who_  become, IMHO, a disaster as showrunner. 

For instance, let's go back to what is probably my favorite episode from Season 3, which is Moffat's "Blink." I say "probably" only because it has almost no Martha in it and I did love Martha's character. Here's what I loved about "Blink":  
  
 **1) It did something new with narrative structure.**  
  
For most of the writers, time travel is the theme but it has no impact on the form. In "Blink" the fact that time is not a line affects the shape of the episode. Although there is a definite linear through-line which tracks Sally Sparrow's experience of her own timeline, the other bits and pieces are jumbled up and out of order (we see bits and pieces of the Doctor's "don't blink" speech on various TV monitors before that conversation, from Sally's POV, actually "happens," and so on). Much of the suspense in this episode is created using that method; Sally's always seeing things before she has any way of knowing what they mean.  
  
 **2) The weeping angels were a new twist on an old device, but Moffat deployed it very effectively.**  
  
The idea of things creeping up on you when you're not looking is pretty primal and it's been used before. But Moffat does a good job of making that atmospheric and creepy but also rationally explicable within the terms of the show--and this idea of the "quantum-locked" creature that can only move when it's not being observed is really pretty neat. The fact that the weeping angels can move in the dark but are frozen in the light gives everyone many opportunities for visually interesting and very unsettling chase sequences. Although it's pretty clear, once the angels start moving, that they're made of resin and not actual stone, in general the effects are simple enough but very well done.  
  
 **3) The plot makes sense, as long as you buy into the idea that time is not a line.**  
  
In a world without time travel this plot would be cheez whiz. But in a world where you *could* travel in time, there's nothing about "Blink's" plot that is too implausible. For every one of the clues that Sally has to interpret, there's a (within the universe's rules) rational explanation both for how it's created and how it gets to her. And the way "Blink" handles that process emphasizes one of the most affecting and melancholy things about "The Girl in the Fireplace," which is the frustration the young Mme de Pompadour about having to travel "the slow road." The Doctor can normally zip around all he wants, but characters like Sally's best friend, and that poor detective who has to wait 30 years to meet her again just before he dies, have to pay their temporal dues, and although it's not gory or sensational there is something kind of tragic about how little time our bodies have to live--and how slow, and how fast, our time really goes.   
  
The work put in on making all this credible is what allows us to enjoy things like the scene in which Sally finally gets to talk to the Doctor and the random things the Doctor has been saying on these video screens finally make sense. We get the same pleasure we always get from a well-made plot: seeing all the pieces finally fit together and generate the picture.  
  
The only dodgy bit, really, is the fact that there's no legitimate origin point for this chain of events, since the action that makes them possible (Sally handing the Doctor the evidence folder when they meet in her timeline) is itself possible only after all those things have happened. But since that's the only impossibility we're asked to swallow, and it occurs in the last two minutes of the episode, we can just figure well, we don't know hwo all this timey wimey stuff works, it's kind of cool even if I don't understand it.  
  
So you could see how, from "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink," you could form the impression that Moffat really likes plotting. Certainly "Blink" shows him to be very good at it when he puts his mind to it. However, in seasons 1-4 Moffat had to get his scripts past a few people further up in the chain of command before they got made, which meant he had to conform to their expectations; and clearly, one of the things Davies expected was a plot that made some sense. I'm not saying there weren't any WTF? plotting moments in season 1-4, but in general Davies seems to have appreciated the role that a tightly constructed plot plays in generating and sustaining the viewer's interest and heightening his/her emotional investment.   
  
On the evidence of Seasons 5-6, however, (don't know about season 7, don't really want to know), it appears that for Moffat, plotting was just something he did to make other people happy. You can actually see signs of impending doom in a two-parter that I loved at the time: "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances." There's that moment toward the end of "The Doctor Dances," where the Doctor figures out that he can use the nanowhatsamajiggers in the ambulance pod to cure Gas Mask Disease, and he has that little speech about how "just this once, everybody lives." That was the moment I picked out in [this post](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/56396572829/how-i-became-a-dr-who-fan-at-around-11-00am-this) to explain how I became a fan of the show. If you read the commentary on the images, though, you can see that just before #9 gives that speech, there's a lot of frustration about how magic-wandy this glowing-cloud-of-nanothings resolution is. At the time, though, it didn't matter because of the poignancy of that one moment where you see Mr. Angsty War-Weary Doctor praying to who knows what for just ONE fucking day when things don't have to be so dark. "Just this once, Rose...everybody lives!"  
  
The problem is that when Moffat gets the reins, those happy-making but hard-to-swallow miracle moments don't happen "just this once." They happen ALL THE FUCKING TIME, because evidently Moffat sees Doctor Who as straight-up fantasy and for him, fantasy is all about wish fulfillment. And when he's in charge, nothing ever happens "just this once." All the things he thinks are cool are re-used so often that they turn into crap. River escapes pursuit by gracefully throwing herself out the window three times in two seasons, for instance. He totally ruins the weeping angels by destroying everything that made them cool: the fact that they 'kill you nicely' (by transporting you back in time to live out the rest of your life), their silence (actually, having the weeping angels communicate through dead "sacred Bob's" voice ruins both the silence of the angels AND the "data ghost" thing that was put to such horrifyingly effective use in "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead"), and their subtle menace (there is nothing subtle about the slavering hordes of snarling angels rampaging through "Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone"). Presumably for Moffat, filling up the screen with bloodthirsty weeping angels was a dream come true. But for everyone else, Season 5 turns a genuinely new and nifty idea into a load of ordinary garden-variety B-movie horror monsters.  
  
And so that's what I think has to explain the mess that is River's Season Six arc. He's acting out his own fantasies, because he can, and unfortunately Moffat doesn't fantasize about coherent plotting or credible backstory or psychological depth or continuity. What he likes is nightmare imagery, grand emotions, creepy references to nursery rhymes and other childhood things, pulling the wool over the viewer's eyes and then pulling the rug out from under them, and gun-toting lipstick-slinging femme fatales who boss men around while being sexy. And all that stuff is what made his individual episodes good; but in the absence of the boring shit that OTHER people care about--like plot--it is definitely not enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before I had seen Series 7. The plotting in the second half of Series 7 is, on average, the worst it's ever been. The only Clara episodes where the plot is at all compelling are "Hide," "Crimson Horror," and "Nightmare In Silver," none of them written by Moffat. "Snowmen" is a terrible premise (killer snow? criminy) poorly executed. "Bells of St. John" steals its plot from "Idiot's Lantern." "Rings of Akhaten's" 'plot' runs on wholly magical logic, which would be all right if the magical rules about how the giant smiley-face monster feeds were not switched up on us at the very last minute in a way that makes very little sense (is Clara the first person on that planet to lose a parent? Hasn't anyone else ever fed this thing something that has sentimental value to them because of its association with an unlived future and its infinite possibility?). "Cold War" is basically monsters on a submarine until somehow Skaldak is taught the true meaning of Christmas. "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS" is just a solid brick of crap. "Name of the Doctor"...oy.


End file.
